Looking back on D-Day and the Battle of Midway

The sixth day of June will forever be associated with one of the most important military operations of all time: D-Day.
Seventy-three years ago, the Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, experiencing nearly 10,000 causalities as they began the liberation of then German-occupied Eastern Europe. The Storming of Normandy was one of the largest seaborne invasions in history, but D-Day also shares an anniversary with the Battle of Midway, dubbed “the Greatest Sea Battle of All Time.”
Today, News 25 spoke to one veteran who was stationed at Pearl Harbor, fought at Midway and lost friends in the Pacific and on the Eastern Front. WWII Veteran Marvin C. Westcott said, “I remember after the war, I went around looking for some of my old friends. When I knock on the door, their mother would come and say ‘oh, he’s gone. He was lost in D-Day.’ And my other friend, lost in Europe. Those things hit you. Of course, they were your old friends and here you are, you come back from the war and you’re ok. It’s kind of hard to put it together, but there’s a reason. There’s got to be a reason.”
According to U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs statistics, only 620,000 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive at last count in 2016.